Review: 'The Oklahoma City Bomber Tapes' Special

Oklahoma City
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Six years before 9/11, a domestic terrorist planted a massive bomb outside the FBI headquarters in Oklahoma City. In this unique documentary, his voice is heard.

For those who can receive it, The Oklahoma City Bomber Tapes is currently on Demand 5. It will almost certainly be syndicated elsewhere, but watch out for it on YouTube in any case.

McVeigh was executed in June 2001, and although he never formally confessed to his crime, he was totally unrepentant.

The film includes archive footage and first hand accounts, but most of all, McVeigh, whose voice is used together with morphing technology to reconstruct the crime. This film is said to have been condensed from 45 hours of tapes.

There are several commmentators, including Mark Potok of the misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center who throws in his two shekelsworth of hate.

McVeigh explains how he chose the target through the phone book and recruited Terry Nichols.

There is probably very little in this video that students of this outrage will not have seen, including details of McVeigh's military service from the first person he killed, an Iraqi. Then came the realisation that the people he had been sent abroad to kill were no different from him.

It is well known that the catalyst for the Oklahoma City bombing was the murder of David Koresh and 82 of his followers by the Federal Government at Waco, Texas. It is also known that at one point McVeigh was actually at Waco. In this film, a journalist who interviewed him at the time recalls the man who sat on the bonnet of his car making what turned out to be a chilling prophesy. McVeigh's act of revenge against the Federal Government came two years to the day after the death of the Branch Davidian cult leader.

He was arrested within two hours of the bombing, pulled up in a routine stop because he had been driving without a license plate, which begs the question, was this the one deliberate clue every murderer is said to leave?

A closer look though shows that he left clues everywhere down to the T shirt he was wearing, as McVeigh himself admits.

If there is one thing that stands out about McVeigh, it is his utter callousness, but like the men who bombed London ten years later, he saw himself as a soldier and the death and suffering he caused, as mere collateral damage, including his own.